Deep inside the British Library, on the shelves of a ‘restricted’ section off-limits to casual visitors, lies a little-known book called The Betrayal Of Youth.

Published in 1986, with a print run of just a few hundred copies, the £7.99 paperback has the dry, unprovocative appearance of a piece of academic literature.

Peer beneath its yellowing cover, however, and you will soon discover that its contents are anything but.

The 200-page tome, which I examined this week, contains a series of essays offering what it calls: ‘Radical perspectives on Childhood Sexuality, Intergenerational Sex, and the Social Oppression of Children and Young People.’

Steven Smith (left) boasted that he ran the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) from behind his desk at the Home Office, while Barry Cutler (right) worked in the same building in the security department

This, it turns out, is a sort of code: for The Betrayal Of Youth is, in fact, a sinister — and at times downright revolting — anthology designed to convince readers that sex with children should be legalised.

The book’s editor was Warren Middleton, a prominent activist with the Paedophile Information Exchange [PIE], the notorious lobby group formed in the Seventies to campaign for the ‘rights’ of predatory sex offenders.

Its purpose was to lend a faux-academic gloss to this organisation’s repulsive belief that the age of consent ought to be abolished.

‘Why do [people] so vociferously defend children’s right to say no to sex while conveniently overlooking their equivalent right to say yes?’ was how Middleton set out this stall, in his introduction.

Warming to this theme, in the ensuing pages, was an essay by Father Michael Ingram, a Dominican priest later convicted of child rape.

‘I have always intimated that many paedophiles are genuine child-lovers,’ he declared. ‘They are affectionate and caring and have a lot to offer children.’

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Also in the book was an essay by PIE activist Roger Moody entitled: How To Make Paedophilia Acceptable, followed by a screed by Beatrice Faust, a radical Australian feminist who worked closely with Germaine Greer.

‘[Paedophilia] belongs among the sexual curios,’ argued Faust. ‘It is puzzling, but hardly a moral infection.’

Perhaps the most chilling contribution to this appalling literary enterprise could, however, be found in its final pages.

There sat a biographical essay by Steven Adrian Smith, a man who had achieved notoriety as the chairman of PIE from 1979 onwards.

Over the course of roughly a dozen pages, Smith told an extraordinary tale.

It described how he had managed, for almost four years, to secretly run the child sex organisation from a small room at the London headquarters of the Home Office, where he worked.

‘PIE did actually have an office in Westminster,’ he gloated, ‘and it was only a smirk away from the desk of the Home Secretary.’

Astonishingly, Smith revealed that, from 1979, he was able not just to gain employment at the Home Office, but also spend most of his (publicly-funded) working day discreetly running PIE affairs from his desk there.

Tim Hulbert has lifted the lid on Home Office funding being given to the Paedophile Information Exchange

He kept membership files (and child pornography) in his office cabinet, wrote PIE newsletters on his desk, and printed them on a department photocopier.

He even manned PIE’s telephone hotline in the room he occupied at the Home Office’s HQ in Queen Anne’s Gate.

‘I was employed by a firm of electrical contractors, Complete Maintenance Limited, to monitor a control panel of alarm systems,’ he explained.

‘The job entailed practically no work on my part, beyond attending the panel, and, in fact, I had a furnished office completely to myself seven days a week on a rotating shift basis.

‘Much of PIE’s less sensitive file material was stored in locked cabinets there, where no police raid would ever have found them.’

Smith owed this cushy existence to a classic piece of public sector incompetence.

‘Every year, my security clearance was renewed by Scotland Yard, without my connection with PIE being discovered,’ he boasted.

Indeed, it was only thanks to the inquisitive Press that Smith was ever rumbled: in 1982, acting on a tip-off, the News of the World made his existence public.

‘My security clearance was cancelled on the spot, my employers notified, and I found myself not sacked, but “rendered without employment”,’ he recalled.

So far, so scandalous. But this week, more than three decades later, Steven Smith was once more in the news.

On Monday, his long-forgotten infiltration of Whitehall — exposed, let us not forget, by the News of the World which was shut down in the phone-hacking imbroglio — was rediscovered by BBC reporters.

They cited it as further evidence that a paedophile ring operated throughout the era, at the heart of the political Establishment.

The BBC’s story came just days after the Home Office was forced to admit that 114 of its files relating to PIE are ‘missing’, presumed to have been destroyed.

They are said to include a dossier of papers detailing paedophile activity among leading MPs and public figures compiled by the late Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens and handed to then-Home Secretary Leon Brittan in 1983.

Lord Brittan now claims he in turn passed it to civil servants and prosecutors. But its contents seem never to have been properly acted on.

Two separate public inquiries have been set up in an attempt to establish what exactly went on, at the Home Office and elsewhere.

One, by Lady Butler-Sloss, is designed to be a lengthy investigation into the handling of child-abuse allegations by a range of public institutions, including schools, care homes and the Church.

The other, by NSPCC head Peter Wanless, will focus on how the Home Office handled recent allegations of child abuse in the early Eighties. It is due to report in ten weeks’ time.

Whatever the outcome, both seem guaranteed to cover explosive ground, if events at Queen Anne’s Gate during the era are anything to go by.

For dig into Home Office history — as I have done in recent days —and you will discover that Steven Adrian Smith sits at the tip of a large and murky iceberg.

Take, for example, the question of how Smith managed to get away with running the PIE from the heart of Whitehall in the first place.

Shockingly, it seems that many in the civil service knew all about his peccadilloes, and indeed actually tolerated them — perhaps due to the misguided belief (then prevalent in liberal circles) that paedophiles were a minority deserving of protection.

As a result, the Home Office only moved to remove Smith when he began to create ugly headlines.

‘Home Office security chiefs knew all about Steven Adrian Smith’s links with PIE,’ the News of the World reported when it exposed him.

Smith boasted of running PIE from behind his desk in Queen Anne's Gate, the old Home Office building. In another incident In the 1980s a whistleblower revealed packages had been sent to the building containing indecent images of children

‘A Home Office spokesman said: “We’re aware of Smith’s background, and since you contacted us he has been told he’s no longer acceptable to us.

"He no longer works here. It would be true to say he would still be here if you hadn’t been in touch.” ’

Smith was not the only PIE official on the Ministry’s payroll, either.

Indeed, later in the book The Betrayal Of Youth, he revealed that the organisation’s Secretary, Barry Cutler, also worked at Queen Anne’s Gate, in the security department.

Cutler was also exposed by a Sunday newspaper soon after Smith. But so relaxed were Home Office officials about paedophilia that they did nothing to prevent either man from covering their tracks.

‘The extent of security chiefs’ knowledge of my activities did not prompt them to investigate the contents of my filing cabinets,’ wrote Smith.

‘A carload of PIE files was safely spirited from the building before it could occur to them to intervene.’

No one at the Home Office took responsibility for this scandalous oversight. It wasn’t until 1984 that Smith faced any form of justice, after being charged with child porn offences thanks to a child safety campaigner called Charles Oxley, who finally did what the authorities had spent years failing to do, and infiltrated PIE.

Yet through further Home Office incompetence, or perhaps indifference, Smith was allowed to escape to Holland, where he successfully claimed political asylum by saying he was part of a persecuted minority group.

He remained there until 1991, when he returned to the UK in the (apparent) belief that he would not be re-arrested. He was mistaken, and at the Old Bailey found himself jailed for 18 months.

‘PIE did actually have an office in
Westminster, and it was only a smirk away from the desk of
the Home Secretary.’- Steven Smith, PIE member

Interestingly, his defence counsel was one Adrian Fulford, a Left-leaning barrister with close links to PIE, who had co-founded an organisation called Conspiracy Against Public Morals (CAPM) in the early Eighties.

The CAPM defended PIE leaders facing criminal charges as it was opposed on principle to the use of charges of conspiracy to corrupt public morals.

Cutler sat on the board of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (serving for years alongside Labour minister Chris Smith) until 2011, when he was convicted of being part of a child pornography ring.

These days, Sir Adrian Fulford is Lord Justice Fulford, a senior Appeal Court judge who as a Privy Counsellor advises the Queen.

When his links to PIE were revealed by the Mail on Sunday early this year, Sir Adrian apologised and said: ‘On reflection, the NCCL [National Council for Civil Liberties] gay rights committee should never have allowed members of PIE to attend any of its meetings — I am very sorry for what happened.’

He underwent a disciplinary investigation by the judiciary’s self-regulator, the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office.

The JCIO announced last month that it had ‘fully exonerated’ Lord Justice Fulford of misconduct, but the full findings of its disciplinary investigation have not been published.

This fact sparked criticism from the influential legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg, who argued that ‘nothing less’ than full disclosure would convince the public that the self-regulating judiciary were not ‘looking after their own’.

Back at the Home Office, further institutional failures became even more evident in November 1983, when a whistleblower revealed that an employee at Queen Anne’s Gate had been caught two years earlier receiving parcels containing child pornography.

One package, containing 12 obscene letters and 57 photos and projector slides, was addressed to the civil servant and discovered in his pigeon hole.

But rather than call in the police, mandarins decided to ‘keep it in the family’ by mounting an internal investigation.

Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss who has been charged with undertaking one investigation into how institutions handled child-abuse allegations

No action was taken, he was allowed to keep his job, and the affair was kept secret because civil servants believed, according to a newspaper, that ‘the confidentiality of the recipient [of the illegal child pornography] must be upheld’.

At the same time as reaching this shameful decision, Home Office bosses decided to commission an internal report on the age of consent.

The staff chosen to carry out this delicate exercise were a pair of Left-leaning criminologists called Ron Walmsley and Karen White.

In keeping with their liberal principles, the duo’s booklet, Sexual Offences, Consent And Sentencing, argued that the age of consent should be lowered to 14 — and 12 in some cases — and penalties for incest reduced.

One chapter said that many girls reach puberty before their tenth birthday and may not only want sex but initiate it themselves.

This line of thinking was music to the ears of the PIE, whose founder Tom O’Carroll swiftly praised Walmsley and White in his sexual ‘manifesto’, a book called Paedophilia, The Radical Case.

Advancing PIE’s vile agenda is bad enough. But perhaps the most damaging charge recently levelled against the Home Office for what happened during the Seventies is that it also helped to finance it.

This extraordinary claim was first made last year by Tim Hulbert, a retired civil servant, who in 1979 worked for its Voluntary Services Unit, which distributed grants to non-profit-making organisations.

During the first year of the Thatcher administration, Mr Hulbert says he was shocked to discover an application for a renewal of around £30,000 of funding for PIE.

He alerted his boss, Clifford Hindley, but was told in a ‘frank exchange’ to drop things.

‘Hindley gave me three reasons,’ Mr Hulbert says. ‘One, PIE was recognised as a legitimate campaigning organisation. Two, this was a renewal of an existing grant.

'Three, that PIE was being funded at the request of Special Branch, who found it politically useful to keep an eye on paedophiles.’

Tim Hulbert was duly silenced. He went on to have a successful career in public life, rising to head of social services at Bedfordshire County Council, before retiring in the Nineties.

In 2013, however, amid growing rumours of a network of paedophiles in high places, he passed on details to the Labour MP Tom Watson.

Shortly afterwards, his claims (but not his identity) became public. And at this point, things became murkier still.

Firstly, it emerged that the Home Office’s Clifford Hindley, who died in 2006, had for much of his life had an obsessive, academic interest in gay relationships between men and boys — and may even have been a PIE member.

Secondly, the Home Office announced a formal inquiry into Mr Hulbert’s claims. But — in a typical example of Whitehall’s culture of secrecy and unaccountability — insisted the identity of the man carrying out the inquiry remain secret.

Even MPs have been prevented from knowing who exactly he is, learning only that he works at the HMRC.

The veil of secrecy surrounding his identity suggests he may be one of many security service officers seconded to HMRC.

The Home Office will not formally comment on this matter. But if the man is indeed a spy, then his appointment to investigate this scandal — which, remember, revolves around suggestions that the security services were behind the public funding of PIE — would represent a terrible conflict of interest.

Theresa May has now agreed to Hillsborough-style sweeping investigation into paedophile claims

Either way, the man leading the inquiry promptly approached Hulbert for evidence. But according to friends, ‘did so in such a way as to make Tim feel threatened’.

Hulbert was told, for example, that he should consider having a lawyer with him when talking to the inquiry, which according to friends ‘left him thinking he might face disciplinary action if he said the wrong thing’.

Hulbert also sought assurances that he would not be prosecuted for accidentally breaking the Official Secrets Act while testifying. But no such assurance was forthcoming, so he decided to give his initial evidence in writing.

After carefully filing his submission, he then expected the inquiry leader (whose identity is known to the Mail) to contact him confirming receipt and asking follow-up questions.

No such contact was made. And despite a string of calls and messages from Hulbert, all of which went unanswered, the two men never actually spoke.

Nothing happened for several months. Then, on Monday the Home Office decided suddenly to publish the investigation.

Its report described Tim Hulbert’s evidence as ‘hazy’ and ‘vague’ and claimed there was no documentary evidence of payments to PIE (ignoring the fact that such documents could be among the 114 ‘missing’ files).

All of which seemed unconvincing, given that the author of the report had never bothered to cross-examine Mr Hulbert.

‘Tim is very angry,’ says a friend. ‘He has run investigations and internal inquiries, and if someone had handed him that report, he would have thought it was a bad joke.

'As to being called vague, Tim says he’s as clear about his recollection of that meeting in 1979 as if it happened yesterday.’

‘From a political point of view, my
evidence is incredibly embarrassing and dangerous, and I believe the
Home Office is now interested only in burying this once and for all,’- Whistleblower Tim Hulbert

Mr Hulbert, who came forward and identified himself this week, hopes to be allowed to give evidence to the Wanless inquiry as it investigates whether the Home Office failed to act on claims of child sex abuse in the dossier handed over in the Eighties.

But given his previous experience, Mr Hulbert can be forgiven for wondering if the Establishment really wants to get to the bottom of this affair.

‘From a political point of view, my evidence is incredibly embarrassing and dangerous, and I believe the Home Office is now interested only in burying this once and for all,’ he says.

If history has taught us anything, it is that tolerating and promoting the paedophile agenda — not to mention covering it up — can have awful consequences.

In 2011, former Home Office official and PIE member Steven Smith, who changed his name to Steven Freeman, appeared at the Old Bailey alongside his old literary collaborator Warren Middleton — editor of The Betrayal Of Youth — who had changed his name to John Parratt.

The pair were found guilty of orchestrating a massive child pornography ring whose members shared thousands of images of abuse along with computer games in which players had to rape as many young boys as possible.

So large was the collection of ‘vile and disgusting’ child pornography found at Smith’s home, the court heard, that it was ‘among the worst’ officers had ever seen.

Smith remains in prison. Middleton, meanwhile, has been released and has been allowed to take up residence at a block of council flats in Putney, South-West London.

He refused to talk when I visited this week.

Within half a mile of his new home are four primary schools, three nursery schools and two playgrounds.

A sobering reminder, perhaps, of the degree to which the authorities are either unwilling, or unable, to protect the public from the former members of the Paedophile Information Exchange who still live in their midst.